Looking Back 1982: Bastian Blessing workers approves wage concessions

Tri-Cities Historical MuseumThe sprawling Bastian Blessing Co. plant, circa 1940, at 422 N. Griffin in Grand Haven, gave the local economy a shot in the arm during the depths of the Great Depression when it relocated here from Cleveland in 1933.This week 28 years...

This week’s retrospective is from May 15, 1982, when, union workers at Grand Haven restaurant furnishing manufacturer Bastian Blessing opted for a pay cut in order to keep the company competitive during the severe recession that followed the Savings and Loan crisis.The Chronicle said on May 15, 1982:By WILMA RANDLEGRAND HAVEN — Sheet metal Union workers at the Bastian Blessing Co. voted Friday afternoon to accept a company request to lower their wages by $1 an hour over the next three years.

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Keep reading for Dave LeMieux's More on the story, including a conversation with William Easterling, former business manager of Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 430.

The workers are members of Local 430, AFL-CIO. They voted Friday to renegotiate the contract by a 101-vote margin, 155-54. They then discussed and picked one of three similar wage and benefit rollback proposals, which had been offered by the company and recommended by both the union’s bargaining committee and executive board.

Local 430 has 281 members at Bastian Blessing. There are currently 95 union members on layoff, said William Easterling, union business manager.

Both company and union officials said later they were pleased with the voting results. The concessions are to go into effect once the company’s new owners take over.

Prior to the vote, union members heard company and union officials discuss the current status of the restaurant food service equipment manufacturer.

A group of buyers, which includes some local Bastian Blessing executives, is negotiating with the company’s parent firm, Bastian Industries, to buy the Grand Haven facility. The Union was told that concessions were needed to help secure the deal. Bastian Industries is based in New York City. The company specializes in food service equipment, electronic and metal components, oil field supplies and data processing.

View full sizeTri-Cities Historical MuseumIn 1908, Charles Bastian and Lewis Blessing, employees at Liquid Carbonics Manufacturing Co., the Midwest’s first soda fountain maker, started the company that bore their name. Soda fountains, like this one made by Bastian Blessing, were hugely popular in the 1940s and 1950s, when corner drug stores around the country dispensed sodas, malteds and ice cream.When asked about the pending sale, company vice president and spokesman Robert L. Walma would only confirm that the company is currently negotiating with a buyer. The details should be worked out in a few weeks and an announcement will be made then, he said.

In early April, company salaried workers agreed to take cuts in wages and fringe benefits which ranged from 2.5 to 10 percent over the next three years. This included conceding a holiday and birthday paid day off.

Union officials said the announcement of local ownership helped sway the union vote. The other reason it passed is that the union realized they had little choice, said a bargaining committee member.

Taking a revote was nothing new for the sheet metal workers. Last winter, they voted twice before ratifying the current three-year pact. That agreement gave workers a wage increase of $1.66 an hour over three years.

One union member joked as he walked out of the meeting, “Well, I’ll see you guys at next week’s vote.” Other union members were not as cheerful. “I think they’re giving us the shaft,” grumbled one. “We just love giving away a dollar,” another replied cynically.

It was a tough decision, but the workers realized they had little choice, said Easterling later.

Bastian Blessing is facing possible serious financial troubles with the loss of its biggest contractor, McDonald’s Corp., the fast food giant. The company lost the bid on the contract renewal last fall; the McDonald’s contract represented nearly 60 percent of the company’s business.

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The recession in the early 1980s, which forced workers at Bastian Blessing Industries to take a $1 pay cut, was nothing compared with the current one, Bill Easterling said.

“It wasn’t as bad then as it is now,” said Easterling, 64, former business manager of Sheet Metal Workers Union Local 430.

“It was mainly the auto industry back then. The construction industry was not as bad as it is now,” Easterling said.

William EasterlingThe recession, which began in July 1981 and officially ended in November 1982, was just a bump in the road in Bastian Blessing’s 70-year history in Grand Haven.

“Our profitability wasn’t like it should be,” Easterling said. “That was the reason we took the pay cuts, mainly to get a little more competitive so we could go after other contracts.”

Although business at Bastian Blessing never again came close to what it was in the boom years leading up to that recession, it did return to normal, Easterling said.

“After that recession we got back to what would be considered normal,” Easterling said. “We called back everyone who was laid off. We were cruising along after that, but the second shift was never as big, again.”

There’s never been anything like the boom years leading up to the 1982 recession, Easterling said, when the plant was running two 12-hour shifts.

“We were so busy we were working Saturdays,” Easterling said. “I made a mint working them 12-hour days. I took all the overtime and paid it on the house and my car and got it all paid off. We were pretty prosperous.”

The average wage at the plant in 1982 was $8.57 an hour.

By the late 1970s, statewide unemployment had dipped to 6.9 percent. Easterling said close to 600 people worked at the sprawling Grand Haven plant that covered six city blocks.

Unemployment rates began creeping up following the 1979 energy crisis and skyrocketed when inflation and nose-bleed interest rates combined to plunge the U.S. economy into a severe recession in the summer of 1981.

At times, Michigan unemployment rates rose by close to 1 percent per month, topping out at 16.8 percent in December 1982 — a month after the recession officially ended.

Easterling hired on at what was once Grand Haven’s biggest employer a year after graduating from high school in 1964 and was still there when the plant closed in 1988.

It wasn’t the economy that ended Bastian Blessing’s 70-year run in Grand Haven.

Statewide unemployment was 7.8 percent and falling when, following a merger, the company closed up shop and moved to St. Louis, Mo., in April 1988.

“They got some government incentives to move to St. Louis and made a bunch of money doing it,” Easterling said.

Now retired, Easterling worked at Westshore Services as vice president for the fire repair division and served as Robinson Township’s fire chief, building inspector and constable.